Editor’s Notes

 

Some Notes on the Current State of the Notes

 

•           At present the Z-site primarily includes:

◦           a comprehensive set of annotations to “A”, all the short poems and the major prose works.

◦           bibliographical information on LZ’s works, including a full chronology of composition and publication dates, as well as criticism and reviews on LZ.

◦           textual variants in “A” 1-8 and “A” errata.

◦           information on “Objectivists” publications, LZ’s library and where to locate his manuscripts and papers.

•           To begin with, a primary task of this website has been to pull together the basic information and annotations that has been done so far on LZ’s work, which have been scattered and often difficult to find. Scholarly work on LZ’s work began in 1969 with the publication of CZ’s A Bibliography of Louis Zukofsky and L.S. Dembo’s interviews with LZ, Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi, which were conducted in association with a conference on the Objectivists organized the previous year. However, it would be yet another decade before substantial critical work began to appear in mainstream academic venues, with the publication of the essays in Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet (1979), edited by Carroll F. Terrell, Barry Ahearn’s Zukofsky’s “A” (1983) and a more or less steady trickle of articles, particularly in Sagetrieb since 1982. With the recent centennial of LZ’s birth, it seems a good time to consolidate what has been done, which also makes apparent the unevenness of the critical attention the larger body of LZ’s work has received so far.

•           The notes attempt to stick to reasonably objective annotation, background, source identification and cross-references, while avoiding more speculative interpretation, although recognizing there is no clear demarcation and that in some cases speculation may be all we have. Also, keeping in mind that this is a tool intended potentially for students as well as scholars, I have often risked annotating what may be obvious to most readers. Throughout most of “A”, LZ incorporates a considerable amount of contemporary, newsy references, much of which is quite ephemeral, although how ephemeral will often depend on the reader’s own personal history. Many of us can readily recall various images LZ evokes in the 1960s sections, but increasingly more cannot. There is unquestionably more such detail of this nature that could be added to these notes.

•           Dates of composition: From early on, LZ was in the habit of meticulously dating and preserving his manuscripts (he never typed). The specific dates I have noted for given works are usually from these manuscripts as documented in Booth and Henderson, but they should be taken with some care because it is often not clear precisely at what point in the composition process these dates refer. Most often the dates appear to indicate the completion of the original version, and sometimes but not always LZ will date significant revisions. The sources for composition dates are CZ’s A Bibliography of Louis Zukofsky (1969), updated in Terrell (1979), which gives a year by year chronology of composition, and Marcella Booth’s A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection (1975), which including specific dates written on manuscripts and is updated by Cathy Henderson’s “Supplement to Marcella Booth’s ‘A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection’” (1987).

•            Translations: LZ relied heavily on translations, frequently adopting or adapting the wording of specific renditions. I have tried to indicate whenever we know the specific translations LZ used, which in most cases are easy enough to identify either from internal evidence or from such sources as the partial lists of LZ’s library books. When offering translations of untranslated passages in LZ’s works, I generally have preferred to use renditions that are as literal as possible and follow the syntax closely, in some cases jury-rigging my own versions.

•            Although there are occasional exceptions, I have largely avoided hyperlinks outside of this website in order to avoid the interminable problem of dead links. In most cases, sources are extensively enough quoted that it is an easy matter to search for the fuller texts. However, among the bibliographies there is a listing of on-line resources.

•            Scholars using this site should be cautious and double-check quotations, references, etc. Aside from the inevitable errors that creep into any project of this size, the fact that I have been based in Asia and Europe imposes limitations on my access to libraries, and frequently I have had to rely on internet texts or second-hand sources for quotations or references. In many cases it has not been possible to track down or identify the precise editions used by LZ. Please let me know if any errors or inaccuracies are spotted.

•           In his reading and use of sources, LZ is possibly the most canonical American poet of the 20th century—he loved reading classics. The immediate advantage of this is that the majority of LZ’s sources are readily available on the web, which makes this project much easier than might have originally been anticipated. Also a web-based resource is less hampered by limitations of space, so I have tended to be generous in quoting passages that LZ used, although how much is enough can be subjective. Particularly because LZ so often composed by reworking found materials in various ways, it is important to identify as precisely as possible the editions or translations he used, so I have tried indicate whenever we can be reasonably certain of the precise text he used and for this purpose the partial lists of LZ’s library is especially helpful.

•            Shakespeare: Not surprisingly, quotations, allusions or reworking from Shakespeare crop up in LZ’s work from beginning to end. LZ’s primary Shakespeare edition was the New Cambridge edition of The Complete Poems and Plays, ed. W.A. Neilson and C.J. Hill (Houghton Mifflin/Riverside, 1942). However, LZ used several different editions—modernized editions in most cases but sometimes old spelling versions (particularly for Pericles). As he indicates in some later sections of “A” and particularly in Bottom, LZ was very interested in textual problems, especially in Shakespeare, and often preferred alternative readings to those accepted by most modern scholars. LZ owned a copy of the First Quartos of Shakespeare’s Poems and Pericles, for which he thanks Mark Van Doren in Bottom (4); this is Shakespeares Sonnets, Lucrece, Passonate Pilgrim, Pericles Being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Editions, edited by Sidney Lee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), from which LZ quotes extensively as well as responding to Lee’s introduction to Pericles in Bottom (293-294, 322-324,328-329). He also often uses first Quarto texts of the poems.

•            Dictionaries: As is well-known, in his later life LZ acquired and was fond of using the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia in ten volumes, from which he used both etymological information and sample quotations. Happily, this dictionary is freely available on-line, and I have used it often for definitions and etymological information in the notes for “A”-12 and following, since LZ mentions that he acquired the Century around 1950 (Prep+ 35). While the Century is a marvelous work, at times its definitions can be quaint and quirky, so occasionally for the sake of lucidity I have opted for a more standard dictionary definition. According to Quartermain (“Writing and Authority” 160), in writing “Thanks to the Dictionary” off and on during the 1930s, LZ used two different dictionaries: Funk and Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary (1930) and Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1917). It should be kept in mind that LZ also used various dictionaries of foreign languages, particularly in relation to his later work where homophonic transliteration becomes an increasingly important compositional method, especially from Greek, Latin and Hebrew. 

•           “A”-22 and “A”-23 pose special problems for the annotator, as they are almost entirely stitched together from numerous reworked sources that are often compacted or blended together. My own perspective is that the identification of sources in these sections is of limited value in reading the poems. This is at odds with a number of commentators, particularly Leggott and Rieke, who argue that these poems cannot be competently read without going back to LZ’s workbooks, identifying his sources and attempting a reconstruction of his compositional process. This strikes me as a self-defeating argument, in which the justification for intensive archival research has obscured a reasonable consideration of why LZ would write these poems. Nevertheless, there is also something irresistible in uncovering the sources behind these poems and revealing the complex and peculiar manner of their transformations, and this does require going to LZ’s workbooks at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The notes to these movements incorporate the identifications made by prior scholarship, but predominately reflect my own research and discoveries. They are certainly not complete, however that might be conceived, but the sources of the large majority of lines have been identified so that the larger shape and organization of the movements with regard to their use of materials is evident. More importantly, the notes indicate the range of methods by which LZ transformed his source materials. Nevertheless, even a definitive identification of a given source text that he is reworking will not in itself necessarily fully account for LZ’s text, as all manner of other associations, recurrences or intersecting texts—sometimes highly subjective and buried—are always possible. Perhaps what is ultimately required is the digital reproduction and transcription of LZ’s working notebooks and reading marginalia (see Paul Zukofsky on the latter).

 

Last revised 7 August 2010